A pizza nobody ordered showed up at U.S. District Judge John McConnell’s home in Providence, Rhode Island. The name on the order was Daniel Anderl, the son of fellow federal judge Esther Salas, who was shot and killed in 2020 by a gunman targeting his mother. McConnell knew exactly what the delivery meant. He picked up the phone and called Salas himself.
That single, chilling detail, reported by The Washington Post on August 5, 2026, has come to symbolize a broader and increasingly documented pattern: threats against federal judges in the United States are climbing sharply, and much of the recent spike traces back to rulings against President Donald Trump and his administration.
The numbers behind the alarm
The U.S. Marshals Service, the agency responsible for judicial security, recorded 564 threats against federal judges in fiscal year 2025, up from 509 the year before. Security incidents the judiciary classifies as “of significant concern” jumped 57 percent over the same period, and officials told Congress they expect the trend to keep climbing.
Go back further and the pattern gets starker. Investigated threats rose from 179 in 2019 to 300 in 2022, then to 457 in 2023, more than double in four years. A CBS News 60 Minutes investigation that aired earlier this year put a different figure on it: 400 judges targeted in a single year, a 78 percent jump over four years, based on interviews with 26 sitting and retired federal judges from both parties.
Whichever count you use, the direction is the same. Threats against the people who sit on federal benches are not leveling off. They’re accelerating.
Why McConnell became a target
McConnell had worked in relative obscurity for 15 years before early 2025, when he granted a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze trillions of dollars in federal funding. Within days, far-right activist Laura Loomer posted about him online, accusing him of overstepping his authority. Elon Musk, who was then leading the Department of Government Efficiency, amplified that post to his massive following, including a photo of McConnell’s daughter, who worked as a political appointee at the Department of Education.
The threats followed almost immediately. Similar pizza deliveries in Anderl’s name have since turned up at the homes of judges in at least seven states, a tactic Judge Mark Norris, a Trump appointee himself, has described as having become routine rather than shocking.
It’s not just one judge
McConnell’s story is the latest to surface, but it fits a pattern other judges have described publicly for months. U.S. District Judge John Coughenour said threats against him spiked after he blocked an executive order targeting birthright citizenship. Judge Ana Reyes read death threats aloud during a hearing on the administration’s move to end legal protections for Haitian immigrants. Judge Michelle Williams Court told reporters she has noticed a rise in “veiled threats” tucked into court filings from attorneys, a subtler, harder-to-prosecute form of intimidation.
Even the Supreme Court hasn’t been spared the president’s public criticism. After the Court struck down Trump’s sweeping tariffs earlier this year, he called two of the justices he had personally nominated “fools” and worse. Chief Justice John Roberts responded with unusually direct public remarks, saying personal attacks on judges were dangerous and needed to stop. He didn’t name Trump, but the timing left little doubt who he meant, it came just two days after Trump had called a judge who ruled against his administration “wacky, nasty, crooked and totally out of control.”
A Reuters investigation published in 2025 found more than 600 social media and message board posts targeting the families of judges who had ruled against the administration, with at least 70 posts explicitly calling for violence or retaliation against them. Those posts, Reuters found, had collectively been viewed over 200 million times.
What officials and judges are saying
Paul Grimm, a retired federal judge who now directs Duke Law School’s Bolch Judicial Institute, has warned that this kind of sustained intimidation could push qualified candidates away from ever accepting a judgeship in the first place. Judge Salas put it more bluntly, describing the current climate as something categorically different from ordinary political friction. “This is no longer apples to apples,” she said. “This is apples to watermelons.”
The White House and senior Justice Department officials have publicly said threats and intimidation against judges are unlawful and unacceptable, even as they continue to sharply criticize individual rulings. That distinction, condemning threats while amplifying criticism that often precedes them, is at the center of the current debate over where legitimate disagreement with a court decision ends and incitement begins.
In April 2026, the Marshals Service asked Congress for additional funding for its judicial security division, warning bluntly that the threat environment is “expected to intensify.”
What this means going forward
Judges across the political spectrum, including several Trump appointees, have started speaking more openly about the danger rather than staying quiet about it. A nonpartisan group called Speak Up for Justice has hosted public forums specifically to give judges a platform to describe what they’re experiencing.
For now, there’s no sign the numbers are about to fall. With more court challenges to administration policy working their way through the system, and rhetoric from both officials and online activists showing no signs of cooling down, judicial security officials expect fiscal year 2026 to bring another increase over last year’s 564 threats.
McConnell, for his part, says the strangest part isn’t the fear itself. It’s what triggers it. “What’s unusual is the dehumanization, the threats, the personalization of our doing our jobs,” he said. For a judge, ruling on a case used to be just that: a ruling. Increasingly, it’s becoming the start of something else entirely.
